A Low Power Asvnchronous MSP430 Processor for Ubiquitous Sensor Network

This paper describes the design of an asynchronous implementation of a sensor network processor. The main purpose of this work is the reduction of power consumption in sensor network node processors and the research presented here tries to explore the suitability of asynchronous circuits for this purpose. The Handshake Solutions toolkit is used to implement an asynchronous version of a sensor processor. The design is made compact, trading area and leakage power savings with dynamic power costs, targeting the typical sparse operating characteristics of sensor node processors. It is then compared with a synchronous version of the same processor. Both versions are then compared with existing commercial processors in terms of power consumption.